K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Maine Superintendent Told Staff To ‘Slow The Process Down’ After Parent Requested Gender Material Be Removed From Classroom. A Maine school superintendent told school staff to slow walk the process after a dad asked the school to remove gender identity materials.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
May 21, 2022
IF A LICENSE CAN BE GRANTED, THEN IT CAN BE DENIED: New Plan from Senate Democrats Would Make Your 2nd Amendment Rights a Privilege.
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Fertilizer Shortage? Try Peeing On Your Plants, Say Experts.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THAT’S MUCH SHORTER THAN M*A*S*H’S 11 SEASONS OF THE KOREAN WAR: Mark Felton on The Forty-Minute Korean War of 1984 (video):
PRISONER OF WOKEZKABAN: Hurrah for new HBO boss uncanceling J.K. Rowling.
Along with the moves by Ron DeSantis, who refused to be bullied by Woke Disney; Elon Musk, who has vowed to unshackle speech on Twitter (if he ever actually buys it); and Netflix, which last week informed its squeaky-toy coterie of aggrieved activists that Dave Chappelle is more important than they are and “Netflix may not be the best place for you,” the rise of [Warner CEO David] Zaslav suggests that the Great Unwokening may already have begun.
The way things are going, it may soon be safe to state true things again.
Much more like this, please.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Rex Murphy: How ridiculous is it for universities to ‘cancel’ sonnets? Let me count the ways.
UPDATE: In response, Neo has composed a sonnet about cancelled sonnets, as part of a post titled: Now a university in England has rejected the sonnet as too white and Western.
(Updated and bumped.)
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! California Church Shooter Has Chinese Communist Party Ties:
The shooter who targeted Taiwanese congregants at a Southern California church is associated with a group tied to the Chinese Communist Party that calls for China’s takeover of Taiwan, Radio Free Asia reported.
David Chou, a 68-year-old Chinese immigrant who on Sunday killed one congregant and wounded five others at Geneva Presbyterian Church before being subdued by parishioners, in 2019 participated in an event hosted by the Las Vegas Association for China’s Peaceful Unification. The group is controlled by the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department and argues that “peaceful unification” between China and Taiwan “is the only way to avoid war.”
Eric Swalwell and Fang-Fang could not be reached for comment.
PRESIDENTS GIULIANI, BLOOMBERG, AND DE BLASIO ARE EAGER TO WELCOME HIM TO THE CLUB: Eric Adams eyeing White House run in 2024: sources.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: California tries to ban guns on movie sets.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Loudoun County School Board Moves to Block Investigation of Sexual Assaults it Covered Up.
OUT ON A LIMB: Hillary Clinton Did It. “In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news. The campaign also delivered the claims to the FBI, giving journalists another excuse to portray the accusations as serious and perhaps true.”
May 20, 2022
OLD AND BUSTED: The Hawaiian Judges.
The New Hotness? Louisiana Judges! “A Louisiana federal judge blocked the Biden administration on Friday from winding down Title 42—a pandemic-related border restriction that allows for the immediate expulsion of asylum-seekers and other migrants.”
YOUNG-ADULT WEBSITE* VOX.COM: The Depp-Heard trial has played right into the hands of far-right extremists.
Conservative media outlets have also promoted a one-sided narrative of the case; Vice recently reported that Ben Shapiro’s popular conservative news platform the Daily Wire has spent nearly $50,000 promoting ads about the trial on Instagram and Facebook — most of it trashing Amber Heard. The presence of these bad actors has, if anything, only exacerbated the vitriol Heard has received within the mainstream.
* * * * * * * *
To be clear, this isn’t an easy story of good and evil. It’s impossible to completely absolve Amber Heard, who has her own alleged history of violence, or frame Depp as a monster incapable of kindness, charity, and the positive energy that amassed him millions of fans to begin with. Yet you don’t need to do either of those things to acknowledge that this is a case about the deeply unfunny topic of intimate partner abuse and that the major points of this trial have already been decided in one court of law. The judge at the first trial in 2020 found Heard had proven 12 of 14 allegations of abuse. So far none of the trial testimony has substantially contradicted anything in Heard’s original claim of being a domestic violence survivor.
Culture critic Ella Dawson has a Twitter thread compiling reporting on the myriad ways in which this trial is not only destroying years of progress made against domestic abuse in the US, but also laying the groundwork for a culture in which bots and bad actors harass, vilify, and eviscerate all other prominent women who publicly name their abusers — like Gamergate, but times tens of millions of participants, and gleefully endorsed by people all across American culture.
That, above all — above the TikTok cat memers mocking Heard and Saturday Night Live dismissing the whole trial as “for fun” — is what’s absolutely jawdropping here. This trial, which amounts to a simple yes/no question over whether Heard had the right to call herself a victim of domestic abuse in a single sentence from that 2018 opinion piece, has somehow united far-right misogynists with middle-of-the-road liberals and geeky progressive fandom acolytes of Depp.
Evergreen:
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Biden Judicial Pick Lied About Cop Killings. Now She Claims She Didn’t.
May 19, 2022
RIP: Vangelis, composer of Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner soundtracks, dies aged 79.
Vangelis had continued his film score work throughout the 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that this reached its commercial heights. Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis’s timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. “My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment,” he later explained.
His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film’s romantic and poignant moments. “It has turned out to be a very prophetic film – we’re living in a kind of Blade Runner world now,” he said in 2005.
Later in the decade he scored the Palme d’Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau.
I saw Blade Runner three or four times during its initial 1982 run, in no small part due to Vangelis’ jaw-dropping synthesized score, which along with Peter Gabriel’s III and IV albums, were a preview of where music would be going in the 1980s.
WE BATTLE THE LEFT BY STANDING UP FOR FREE SPEECH, STANDING UP FOR LIBERALISM:
Obviously, Team Biden figured out that the creation of this new Department of Homeland Security agency was bad politics for them heading into the midterm elections, along with a dozen other obstacles they will have come November.
But this move was also an acknowledgment that people aren’t going to put up with being dictated to by the woke mob anymore, which has seemed to control much of social media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party for the past few years.
I shared this tweet. It went viral.
Much of the replies came from conservatives confused or even offended by my use of the word “liberal.” This is understandable. In modern American politics, “liberal” has long been used to identify people on the Left, Democratic voters, Green Party voters and so on.
What I meant is a definition my fellow libertarians and certain types of conservatives would also recognize. In the simplest terms, the Oxford dictionary defines “liberal” as “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.”
In the cultural battle over free speech in the US right now, it is libertarians, conservatives, and a minority of old school progressives standing up to protect free expression, both public and private, and an increasingly authoritarian Left that clearly does not “respect or accept behavior or opinions different” from their own. They want to label speech they don’t like as “disinformation” and cancel anyone who disagrees with their narrow vision of what is socially acceptable in today’s America.
The contemporary Left is not liberal. It is becoming more illiberal by the day. I’m not saying conservatives have never been guilty of similar censorious attitudes, because some Republican politicians still do push illiberal speech policies.
The left’s adoption of the world “liberal” in the 1920s because Woodrow Wilson had so debased “Progressivism” in the previous decade is one of the greatest stolen bases in history.
SHE’S NOT A WOMAN — SHE’S THE TERMINATOR: Is Anna Wintour human?
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Fisher-Price releases RuPaul figurines, honors efforts to ‘inspire.’